In recent years, wide area networks (“WAN”) have become an important part of the many people's lives. Every day, millions of users connect to the most well known WAN, the internet. Internet services include E-Mail, database access, and news groups. The Internet also acts as a service medium for many companies trying to market products. Accordingly, WANs, such as the Internet have become a valuable resource for people in a broad range of fields including the industry, education, government and research.
In business, for example, many companies have multi-media Internet Web-sites in order to advertise, sell and maintain their products and services. Customers are often allowed to use a customer control portal (CCP) to see into and control some aspects of the services offered by a company. However, as companies are also becoming increasingly more international in business activities, the customers may be accessing the Internet internationally. Also, the contents for presentation may be created at different places.
Because management of these presentations happens at many different levels, one of the hardest things about designing a CCP is managing and maintaining the presentation of contents. For example, if the approval process for each content item and content presentation follows a different process, the resultant presentation may vary in “look and feel.” Also, updates to corporate image and/or legal guidelines requires communication with and development efforts by numerous engineering teams. Accordingly, it may be very difficult, if not impossible at times, to ensure updates for all components of the CCP. Moreover, a further burden is added to localize the portal to many different languages and locales.